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Floor cleaning season

It’s the time of year when keeping your floors clean is about like using a kitchen colander to stem the flow of Niagara Falls. This is especially true if you have pets or children or pets that you consider to be your children. The combination of melting snow and bare earth creates that fascinating substance known as mud. Kids and pets are drawn to mud like iron to a humungous electromagnet that’s powerful enough to pull the rivets out of the Eiffel Tower. Mud magnetism is by no means limited to kids and pets. My wife and I live on a gravel road. No matter how often we wash our ...

Keeping my brain fit

I like Terry Helget. He’s a friend. But sometimes I hate Terry. Terry didn’t mean us any harm. Knowing we were lifelong baseball fans, he introduced a group of us to Immaculate Grid. That is an online, daily game. It’s not for the casual fan. It’s for the fan who devotes each summer to watching grown men play a game, then analyzing it ad nauseum. Does that sound like an addiction? Perhaps. Immaculate Grid was created by computer geek/baseball fans. It’s simplicity is its attraction. A tic tac toe-like grid has nine spaces to be filled in with Major League players from ...

Census Bureau should revise Marshall’s population total

Four years after Census 2020, the mystery of Marshall’s population decline has yet to be solved. Much to everyone’s surprise, the city posted a decline of 52 residents in 2020. It meant that Marshall is no longer the largest city in southwestern Minnesota since Worthington’s total was higher. The city has a logical reason for disputing the census figure. A pandemic like COVID is not the best time to do a census count in a college town. Because of remote learning, many students were not present at the Southwest Minnesota State University campus. Ward One, which includes the ...

‘Ooga-chaka ooga-ooga’ — thinking about Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day — the national holiday that commonly involves expressing heartfelt sentiments with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates — is upon us. Finding a fitting Valentine gift for your Significant Other can be problematic if you have been in a relationship for a long time. It’s difficult to seem romantic and spontaneous when you have shared dozens of Valentine’s Days. A guy has only so many tricks in his little black bag. Things are much easier when a relationship is in its early days and everything is sparkly and new. “Oh my gosh!” a young female might gush to one ...

Zen and the art of welding

I was the kind of kid who despised school. School was just a waste of time, an annoying delay in my plan to launch a career in farming. I informed my parents that I would probably have enough education by the end of third grade. They didn’t agree and instead insisted that I attend classes until I earned a high school diploma. I gritted my teeth every morning as I slouched my way into our gloomy brick schoolhouse. I hate to admit this, but school occasionally had some bright spots. One of them was Ag Class, which was taught by Palmer Eidet. I enrolled in Ag Class because it ...

Perry and the gun debate

We all have bucket lists of places we want to visit. I’ve never been to Hawaii. That is on my list. Perry, Iowa is also on it. The allure of that town in the middle of Iowa isn’t its beaches, although the Racoon River does flow through it. Rather, it’s a unique connection between Sleepy Eye and Perry. They were both stops on Babe Ruth’s barnstorming tour in October 1922. Those two were the only small towns on a trip that included Denver and Kansas City. Babe and Yankee teammate Bob Meusel played in Perry on Friday, Oct. 13. The next two days they were in Lincoln and Omaha. ...